A pair of provocative billboard ads that drew a lawsuit threat for skewering Ivanka Trump and husband Jared Kushner took a cruise down to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago golf resort.
The ads, which bash the two White House senior advisers for their attitude to America’s Covid-19 death toll, have been drawing crowds at New York’s Times Square. But their Lincoln Project creators wanted to catch eyes in Florida heading into election day, too.
The anti-Trump Republican group has also arranged for digital versions of the ads on a truck to circle Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.
The Florida billboard versions are floating off Mar-a-Lago all weekend, then will head to the waters off Miami.
Lincoln Project co-founder Ron Steslow told Florida Politics that the move is part of the group’s “psy ops” attacks, aimed at the “friends and family” of the president – as well as at New Yorkers wintering in South Florida.
The ads feature Kushner and Ivanka Trump beaming next to the number tallying America’s Covid-19 deaths. New Yorkers are “going to suffer, and that’s their problem,” Kushner is quoted as saying.
The couple’s lawyer fired off a letter last week blasting the ads as “outrageous and shameful libel,” and demanded they be removed or he would sue. Attorney Marc Kasowitz insisted that Ivanka Trump had never made the gesture on the billboard, and that Kushner had never uttered such a callous comment.
In fact, the first daughter did make the gesture while posing on Twitter with a can of Goya beans after the company’s CEO praised her dad. And Kushner did say those words, according to a Vanity Fair report last month.
Lincoln Project lawyer Matthew Sanderson fired back that the ads were staying, and that he would love to depose all witnesses in the event of a lawsuit.
“Please peddle your scare tactics elsewhere,” he wrote in a letter to Kasowitz. “The Lincoln Project will not be intimidated by such empty bluster.”
Sanderson noted: “Your clients are no longer mere Upper East Side socialites, able to sue at the slightest offence to their personal sensitivities.” They are now public officials due to a “gross act of nepotism,” and are consequently legally subject to scrutiny and criticism.